Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea by James O. Brayman
page 68 of 316 (21%)
his not having returned home the preceding night, it was generally
concluded that he had been drowned, and a party of his neighbors
proceeded in a boat, early in the morning, in search of his body. On
reaching "Puffin Hole," they discovered his boat fastened to a rock, and
full of water, as she had remained on the ebbing of the tide. This
circumstance induced them to examine the cavern narrowly, and the happy
result of their search is already known.



ADVENTURE WITH A COBRA DI CAPELLO

I might have slept some four or five hours, and a dreamless and
satisfying sleep it was; but certain it is--let scholiasts say what they
will, and skeptics throw doubts by handfulls on the assertions of
metaphysicians--that, before I awoke, and in my dreamless slumber, I had
a visible perception of peril--a consciousness of the hovering presence
of death! How to describe my feelings I know not; but, as we have all
read and heard that, if the eyes of a watcher are steadily fixed on the
countenance of a sleeper for a certain length of time, the slumberer
will be sure to start up--wakened by the mysterious magnetism of a
recondite principle of clairvoyance; so it was that, with shut eyes and
drowsed-up senses, an inward ability was conferred upon me to detect the
living from the presence of danger near me--to see, though sleep-blind,
the formless shape of a mysterious horror crouching beside me; and, as
if the peril that was my nightmate was of a nature to be quickened into
fatal activity by any motion on my part, I felt in my very stupor the
critical necessity of lying quite still; so that, when I at last awoke
and felt that as I lay with my face toward the roof, there was a thick,
heavy, cold, creeping thing upon my chest, I stirred not, nor uttered a
DigitalOcean Referral Badge